Alan Turing Alan Mathison Turing, OBE (June 23, 1912 � June 7, 1954), was an English mathematician, logician, and cryptographer. Turing is often considered to be the father of modern computer science. - - With the Turing test, Turing made a significant and characteristically provocative contribution to the debate regarding artificial intelligence: whether it will ever be possible to say that a machine is conscious and can think. He provided an influential formalisation of the concept of the algorithm and computation with the Turing machine, formulating the now widely accepted "Turing" version of the Church�Turing thesis, namely that any practical computing model has either the equivalent or a subset of the capabilities of a Turing machine